In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance
By Fouad Ajami
Hoover Institution Press, 248 pages
Last Fall, while I was on a reporting trip in southern Spain, my wife and I visited the Alhambra for the first time. Like most visitors, we were awestruck by the Moorish fortress nestled atop Granada in the Andalusian hills. How marvelous the interplay of light and space, how lovely the gardens! Something else caught my attention, too: Judging by the constant murmur of Arabic and Persian tongues and the sight of so many women in hijabs, the complex was full of tourists from Arab and Iranian lands.
This was when the extent, and the horror, of ISIS’s dominion in Syria and Iraq were just coming into public view. Half-literate savages high on millenarian delusion, drawn from across the Middle East and North Africa and from Europe’s Muslim ghettos, were descending by the thousands on Bilad al-Sham, laying waste to its ancient peoples and its archaeological glories. Meanwhile, the industrial-scale torture and slaughter of Syrian civilians by the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Persian patrons continued apace; the death toll of Syria’s civil war was approaching 200,000; millions were displaced; slave markets for Kurdish and Yezidi women had appeared; infants were beheaded.
What went through these tourists’ minds, I wondered, as they made their way through the Alhambra? For Muslims, the place echoes with meaning, proclaiming the Almighty in familiar calligraphy—“There is no God but God,” “Only God is victorious”—but the islet of pride revealed by this recognition floats on a sea of alienation and shame. The Moorish emirs spoke the same language, read the same sacred texts. Yet a chasm separates today’s Islamic world and the world that produced the Alhambra and other achievements of that golden age.
I’m not romanticizing the Muslim conquest of Iberia. It was not an exercise in interfaith dialogue. What distinguished Moorish Iberia—or, say, early Safavid Persia—from today’s Middle East wasn’t a capacity for violence, or even “fundamentalism,” but intellectual openness and a powerful creative drive that could coexist alongside fundamentalism and tremendous violence. The Alhambra uplifts us because it’s the expression of a civilization that had something significant to say, whereas the Muslim Mideast today mostly mumbles or screams inchoate rage, much of it directed at itself.
As the late Fouad Ajami put it in a 1997 essay: “There had been allegory and subtlety aplenty in Islam. In Baghdad during the High Middle Ages, in Islamic Spain in its heyday, philosophers had quarreled about the balance between reason and revelation, perfecting an art of doublespeak that permitted them enormous leeway while keeping the pretense of piety.” Centuries later, Ajami went on, many more Muslims could read and write, “but the learning came without the habits and the attitudes of tolerance.”
Until his untimely death from cancer last year, Ajami was our most lucid chronicler of this tragedy, of the discontinuities, disappointments, and false hopes that have marked the Arab Middle East—or Araby, as he affectionately called it—in the 19th and 20th centuries up to the present day. You might say he was an excavator of the Arab soul, and in a career spanning some four decades, he shared his findings with a broad and grateful American audience. Although he was a scholar by training and vocation, Ajami’s gifts overflowed the narrow confines of academe. His writings combined journalism, biography, intellectual history, literary criticism, geopolitical analysis, and personal insight in a way that was all his own and that enriched and delighted readers as no academic text could.
Ajami was also a relentless truth-teller, tracing the Arab world’s pathologies to their native origins at a time when fashion dictated that the West was to blame for Araby’s poverty and misery. He believed, moreover, that the United States had an important role to play in helping the world’s most repressive region attain a measure of freedom. These positions earned him the eternal enmity of the Middle Eastern studies establishment and the cultural left. His rival Edward Said, Ajami once told me, routinely called him “Uncle Abdoo” (a sort of Arab Uncle Tom) and similar epithets. A 2003 Nation magazine profile labeled him a “native informant.”
After his death, Ajami was treated to perhaps the least gracious obituary ever to appear in the New York Times. Wrote the Times’s Douglas Martin: “Most Americans became familiar with Mr. Ajami’s views on CBS News, CNN, and the PBS programs Charlie Rose and NewsHour, where his distinctive beard and polished manner lent force to his authoritative-sounding opinions.” (Returning to the obituary on the Times website now, five months later, I find that the phrase “authoritative-sounding” has been erased, though the three corrections to Martin’s article don’t account for this revision.)
That even in death Ajami drew such mean-spirited reactions from the mandarin class is a testament to the power of his ideas. Readers looking for an introduction to those ideas would do well to turn to In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance, a final anthology of his writing published by the Hoover Institution, where since 2011 he had found a home after retiring from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. Most of the essays in this book first appeared in the 1990s and 2000s, and they cover the full range of Ajami’s intellectual interests. Many, including a new introduction to the anthology completed before he died, also contain autobiographical notes, and these convey something of the warmth and generosity of the man himself.
Fouad Ajami was born in 1945 in a village in southern Lebanon. His Shiite family hailed from Persia’s Azeri-dominated northwest (“Ajami” is Arabic for “Persian”). You might say he embodied Lebanon’s, and the Mideast’s, ethnic and sectarian contradictions, and yet among the Arab-American professoriate Ajami stood out for lacking a sectarian axe to grind. He immigrated to the United States in 1963, finishing his undergraduate education at Eastern Oregon University before earning a doctorate at the University of Washington.
Ajami’s central concern was the rise and collapse of secular Arab nationalism, a movement the scholar himself would join as a young man before abandoning it and rededicating his career to understanding its failure. From the start, Ajami would conclude, Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism were marred by authoritarian tendencies. The Arabs’ epic military defeat, over the course of six days in 1967 at the hands of Israel, would rob these movements of their main claim to legitimacy, and yet the awful police states they had spawned would live on, zombie-like, suffocating Arab social, cultural, and economic life for generations. The only people who survived these regimes, it seemed, were inspired by Islamism, with its visions of “terror and virtue,” as Ajami wrote.
Throughout In This Arab Time, Ajami marks this sad passage—from the illusion of Arab unity and rebirth in the final days of the Ottoman Empire to the securitates of the Assads, Husseins, and Qaddafis—in the novels of the Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz, the poems of the Syrian writer and diplomat Nizar Qabbani, the underappreciated literatures of Syria and Algeria, and in his own journey in exile, among other things. Ajami’s prose is gorgeous, with words that feel as if they are on the verge of taking flight into poetry (but never do). As befits an account of lost glory, these essays are often written in an elegiac key—even when Ajami is writing in praise of the Iraq War’s essential nobility (in 2007!), or mounting a humane defense of Islam against what he sees as V.S. Naipaul’s “shallow” critique of the faith as nothing more than an ideology of conquest.
All the essays in In This Arab Time are animated by the question of why “the great Arab inheritance had wound its way to two destinations: autocracy and political Islam.” Would there ever be a third path for the Arabs, and what shape would it take? It’s a very important set of questions today, as the Arab Spring recedes like a dream, while sectarian bigotry, authoritarianism, and Islamist obscurantism intensify. But Ajami was considering it long before the Arab Spring broke out, even before 9/11, when the Middle East’s various Baathist republics and venal monarchies were thought to be permanent and invincible.
Now that that veneer of invincibility has been shattered, the authoritarian-Islamist cycle still churns. In the months since Ajami died, the Arab world seems to have found a new moral nadir. An American president whose “patina of cosmopolitanism…concealed the unease with the foreign world at the core of his worldview,” as Ajami wrote, has abandoned the Arabs to the hegemonic ambitions of Iranian ayatollahs and a Sunni terrorist army. The Arab “liberal” intellectuals are as lost as ever. Yet the author remained to the end hopeful that the Arabs would find a way out of their millennial impasse. If and when they do, a new generation of scholars might look back with gratitude to Fouad Ajami, the most consequential Arab thinker of the second half of the 20th century.
